Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday September 12, 2009 @12:15PM
from the feel-free-to-take-sunday-off dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, has decreed a new holiday for his country: Programmer's Day. Appropriately enough, it will be celebrated on the 256th day of the year: September 13th (September 12th for a leap year). Do programmers deserve their own holiday ahead of other professions? Should the rest of the world follow suit?"

List of professions that I think are probably more deserving of their own holiday:

teachers

doctors & other medical professionals

social workers

scientists & mathematicians

mathematicians

firemen/coast guard/rescue workers

artists, musicians, and writers

Of course, some of these are sorta already commemorated by labor day, and I would have also put farmers on the list if most weren't just corporate farms these days. I also thought about including inventors (it'd be nice for encouraging kids to be creative a

Programmers are teachers, scientists, mathematicians and artists all in one. In that I've never met a programmer unwilling to share their insight and knowledge, hypothesize, construct a proof or make something cool appear on the screen.

Well, if you want to look at it like that, then almost anyone can be considered a teacher. Heck, I used to tutor other students after school at the library when I was in high school. Now, as part of my current web development job, it's my responsibility to teach our new high school intern the ins and outs of web development and graphic design. However, I don't think that puts me on the same level as a career teacher.

Don't get me wrong, as a programmer myself and one who's learned immensely from other progra

Right. I think I've met more teachers who are better at teaching, than programmers who wish to teach.

I am a programmer, and I am usually quite reluctant to teaching people about e.g. programming, unless I'm paid for it. It is just too much work, much like the idea of helping out random people you barely know because "I know computers". Give me the money, and then we'll talk. And that, without any guarantees that I'm a good teacher, as, like MOST programmers out there, haven't been educated in pedagogy.

There are teachers', doctors' mathematicians' days in Russia. I am not sure about other but perhaps they exist too. A relevant story.

A Russian grandpa is asked how often he drinks vodka. He replies "Not very often, only when it is a holiday or after a sauna. For example what holiday is it today?" It appeared that no one could recall any holiday today. The grandpa ponders "Hmm sounds like a good day to go to a sauna"

Yeah, and we all know that Tetris didn't do anything other than create an entire new market for games and changed the face of gaming by introducing portable gaming as a real means of gaming. Without Tetris we wouldn't have the DS or PSP.

Whoever modded parent "troll" is a jackass. Tetris really was a profoundly important game; given its popularity and the market it spawned, it's probably up there with, say, Visicalc and Mosaic on the list of (so to speak) game-changing software -- programs that weren't just commercially successful, but created a market for a whole new type of computing. Given that today's cell phone games -- many of which are very Tetris-like -- use more processing power than what was generally available on the desktop when Tetris was first introduced, dismissing its importance because it was "just a game" is a mistake.

Right now, a significant part of Firebird (RDBMS) development takes place in Russia. JetBrains is also a mostly Russian company, and many a Java developer swears by IntelliJ IDEA. And don'Å get me started about ABBYY and Kaspersky Labs products...

If you are trying to figure out when the special holiday sales are on the hard drives, these dates match up to 1st, 10th, 100th, 1000th, 10000th, 100000th, 1000000th, 10000000th and 100000000th respectively.

Amazing how defenses of Bolshevik economics get modded up in spite of how truly horrible it was to actually live in an economy like that. I would rather work in a country where you can actually earn something for a full days work than one where the government comes in and mandates that noone is allowed to work more than 8 hours. I work probably 9-10 hours a day, but at least I get something out of it. And I would not have in the old 'Workers Paradise'.

Communism is not perfect, and I like free market economy. But some things need to be said "NO" to.

You: "I want to work for 10 hours!"

Boss: "Oh, everyone! He can work for 10 hours, that means you can work for 10 hours!"

or:

Boss: "Look, that Other Company makes employees work 12 hours a day! That means we can do that too!"

Worker: "But, that's not fair..."

Boss: "Law doesn't agree!"

Some things need to be mandated through legislation. Is maximum work hours something to be mandated? I don't know, it depends on situation. If bosses don't abuse their power, then sure, sometimes I'd love to be able to work extended hours. But if you live in 19th century and you're a coal miner or a factory worker...

The worker doesnt have to go along with whatever the boss wants. It is a free country. If my boss said that he was going to pay me half of what I make now and ask me to work 16 hours a day I would quit. Sure bosses will try to get as much as they can, but that doesnt mean the workers have to go along with it. Other companies have to compete for workers. That is part of what makes the economy viable.

I am not a total free market ideologue, I do agree that some things need to be regulated. (particularly risk taking in the financial sector) But generally speaking I believe that workers and employers should be able to come to their own agreements with regards to compensation relative to amount of work done.

The problem is that there is a huge disparity in power between employers and employees. You, as an employee, are expendable in the vast majority of circumstances. Some person more desperate than you will take your job. All your boss loses is the time he's put into training you. You, on the other hand, lose your shirt.

I suppose that a lot of that has to do with what industry you work in, but in general I would disagree. For example programmers (I choose it because it is the original topic of this thread):) are hugely expensive to replace. For some complex software products it can take years to get to know all the ins and outs.

What do you really lose by quitting your job? Assuming you can find a comparable new one I do not see any real loss.

I agree that the model breaks down somewhat in eras of extremely high unemplo

It also benefits employment, which was the main argument for the 35 hour week in France (unfortunately it was very poorly implemented). In sectors where you need a certain number of man-hours to get something done (not programming, think, manufacturing), if you need 840 man-hours a week, and that you can make your workers work 40 hours, then you'll have 21 workers. But if you can only make your workers work 35 hours, you'll need to hire 3 more workers because you need 24 of them now.

Where did I defend the Bolsheviks? They created a heinous regime. I simply commented on the irony of the OP portraying them as stern taskmasters, as one of the ways they initially won over the people of Russia was by reducing working hours.

Sorry if my post came across as a 'Youre a commie!' type of comment.:)

However, they were extremely stern taskmasters. What do you think happened to people who did not work, worked less, or decided they wanted to quite their job and do something different? I'll give you a hint: It was a hell of a lot worse than getting fired or making less money which is what happens when you skip work in the USA. When you completely remove incentives to excel the only way anything gets done is if you punish people who d

Criminal punishments for skipped workdays were in effect from 1940 to 1946 - essentially during the WWII.

Later, there were punishments for 'social parasitism' if you were unemployed for more than 4 consecutive months (not counting vacations, medical leaves, full-time education, etc.). And the Soviet government guaranteed employment for everyone.

So stop telling fictional horror stories. There were enough real horror stories about the Soviet regime.

I think you have no idea how horrible things in Russia actually were before the Revolution. "Earn something for a full days work," bwahahaha. Yes, in retrospect Communism was a terrible mistake. But it didn't happen in a vacuum -- there was a reason people were willing to fight against the existing system.

No doubt things were bad in Russia, but the Bolsheviks were not the ones with the solutions. There were lots of pro-democracy and moderate socialists who on the rise before the Bolsheviks seized power. Those were the ones who could have turned Russia's industrial revolution into a good thing, but Lenin (and later Stalin) basically had them killed and exiled. To say that the Bolsheviks were the champions of workers welfare is just crazy.:)

It even gets worse. As they saw them losing the civil war, they fleed to another countries and left more or less scorched earth behind them - they were ok with Russian people starving as long as the reds don't get any working industry.

Well, it's not all black and white here. The idea was to eliminate worker extortion. A concept you might know from not being able to quit when the working condition / pay ration becomes unbearable.Their attempt obviously failed. But the spirit was undoubtedly a good one. (As it usually is.)

Their main faults were to think that "everyone is equal", while some still were "more equal" than others. Thereby again creating the old hierarchy, or "boss paradise".(Originally, those "more equal" were just there to manage the transition, and then dissolve. Which for reasons of basic human behavior never happened.)We must accept, that humans first think of themselves. Even when we give, we do so, because it feels good to us, and because we follow our goals. If your goal is to make someone else big, and that makes you happy, you still do it for yourself. So this does not mean it is bad. And as for being egoistic, being the opposite of altruistic sacrifice, I can just quote someone I do not like very much, but who is right:“It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.” — Ayn Rand

So my solution (yes, I thought about this quite a bit) is very simple: In such a new "company", everyone can work for multiple people and let multiple people work for him. So it's not a hierarchy anymore, but a free graph. Which means that not only a boss can prefer one of his employees, but an employee can prefer one of his bosses. Or in proper non-biased terms: A service provider and a money provider, or two service providers, (two money providers would be strange, but thinkable), have equal freedoms. If one of your "bosses" offers a crappy deal, you can say no, and take a better one. Just as he can take a better one than you. You don't have to have any long-term contracts (although you can). You can simply work on a project basis.This would not have been possible, two decades ago. But with computers being ubiquitous, the whole contract-, "self-employment"- and tax management, can be automated. Even as a service.I'd try that. Even if just to see the flaws, and fix them.

Workers in Tsarist Russia were forced to work 16-18 hours six of seven days a week to be able just to feed themselves. For them there were no paid vacations, no pensions, no healthcare, no nothing. Do you think that anybody in their right mind would agree to work additional 8 hours in a coal mine just for fun?

"I work probably 9-10 hours a day, but at least I get something out of it" - that's because workers' movements had won in the USA and other Western countri

> Well, in Russia, police officers, medical workers, and every other profession actually have their own "days" as well.^^^^^^That, and also there seems to be a misunderstanding here, aka lost in translation. It's not a holiday in a sense that the whole country has a day off. It's just an official nifty name for this particular day. Also a good occasion to praise the work of your friendly programmer in the next cubicle.

WASHINGTON -- President Reagan took time out Friday from visiting with Chad's president, tracking South Korean unrest and trying to influence a Senate trade bill to proclaim last week "National Dairy Goat Awareness Week."

Acting on a congressional resolution, Reagan praised dairy goats for their ability to thrive in harsh surroundings and for their link with American history.

What the OP is talking about is Obama's Speech [youtube.com] at the Pentagon. Watch at about 4:00 minutes in, and listen to what the President is saying... "On this first National Day of Service and Remembrance, we can summon once more that ordinary goodness of America to serve our communities..."

Probably not ahead of scientists/mathematicians/enginneers. But still, pretty cool.

And can't but think it will be yet another forgotten day - secretary's day, siblings day, etc. All exist, all forgotten. Every day is proclaimed something and the novelty wore off or never caught on. Probably the only novel thing would be to have a "regular" day where nothing is officially remembered/celebrated/commerated/pissed_on/whatever.

In 20-30 years, we may have a holiday to honor the warriors of the internet battlefield. With cyber command coming online in the next few years and government sanctioned internet attacks coming out of china, the next great war might be fought with light cycles and crazy computer graphics that stand in for a command console. Think of it as a memorial day, but for those who fight to defend our infrastructure.

"God performed surgery when he removed Adam's rib, so my profession is indeed the oldest" said the doctor. "But before that God performed feats of engineering to create the Earth from void and chaos, so my profession must be the oldest" countered the engineer. The programmer looked at them contemptuously and replied: "gee, where do you think void and chaos came from?"

Programmers wont be so happy with their day changing in leap years (is almost a tradition to forget that they exists or not calculate that properly, in the other hand, you can say you grown as programmer when you start caring about that detail).But if they want to take a date which number means everything, they could pick Feb 11th, with the advantage that dont change leap years (is not specific for programmers but a lot will get the reference).

In Russia a "professional holiday" is NOT a real holiday and it is NOT a day off. It is a mere sign of appreciation for a certain professional activity. You might hear nice words about your buddies on TV and Radio and you have one more reason to have some drinks that day. Most of "important" professions in Russia have their professional days -- from teachers, doctors all way to police and steel-mill workers. It is no surprise whatsoever that IT workers (aka programmers) get their professional day too.